Review: Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 Pulse

Conclusion

Sapphire's first 7nm Navi graphics cards, the Radeon RX 5700 Pulse and RX 5700 XT Pulse, address most of the criticisms aimed at AMD's reference boards.

The dual-fan design, with aluminium backplate and secondary cooling plate for memory, does a fine job of keeping temperatures well within the limit, noise levels have been reduced, and with a 0dB mode featured as standard, the cards are practically silent when idle.

Construction quality is decent if not spectacular, and though the colour scheme won't suit every build, Sapphire has done enough to make the Pulse models a preferred upgrade over AMD's basic reference cards. The caveat, inevitably, is one of price. In the US, a small premium makes the Sapphire cards a no-brainer, however a larger markup here in the UK has the opposite effect.

Bottom line: Sapphire's Radeon RX 5700 Pulse makes sense in those regions where pricing is within five per cent of reference, but on British shores too high a premium puts it perilously close to the equivalent GeForce RTX.

Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 Pulse

HEXUS.where2buy*

The Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 Pulse graphics card will be available to purchase from Scan Computers.

HEXUS.right2reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.